


amandant

by Alias (anafabula)



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Because it’s mostly, Canon-Compliant, Extra Treat, Gen, Grief, Implied/referenced medical trauma, Introspection, Oops! All Suffering, Other people are here too but briefly, Referenced Major Character Death, Spoilers through MAG 120, Survivor Guilt, canon-typical Martin pining, implied suicidality, spooky evil dreams
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-23
Updated: 2019-02-23
Packaged: 2019-10-13 19:25:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17493827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anafabula/pseuds/Alias
Summary: Martin knows the way this story goes: down on the record as the inexorable progression that awaits everyone like him.Be human, do his best, and die, eventually, one way or another.





	amandant

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lontradiction](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lontradiction/gifts).



> I started this in September as a Trick or Treat gift, believe it or not... ~~so anonymous for a bit, in the same spirit.~~ Boop! Here I am. 
> 
> Glad to finally get it out there. I so hope you like it.

It used to hurt when Martin realized things. He can remember this with useful, usable clarity, and tell himself about it: the edge of vertigo in his resignation upon realizing he was going to have to throw his life away in any conventional sense, because even if he didn’t sleep there weren’t hours enough in the day and they were flanked by the twin spectres of eviction on one side and starvation on the other.

Something like dying himself when it broke on him what a normal life Martin Blackwood could have if he were an orphan; anything but sacrificing absolutely anything for his mother’s sake meant allowing for the knowledge she could die sooner and he’d in more ways than not be free; every sharp edge honed on the long, long grind of knowing exactly what her eyes meant when she looked at him, well before the presence of mind to lie had abandoned her.

(Something sweeter, clearer and more hopeless, years later, the nothing-good-can-come-of-this revelation endemic to being in love.)  
  
It used to be an acute shift of focus, when his world was changed somehow. Not the shaky resignation of realizing what world he’d been living in all along, undermining any sense of shock. Not like how the sense of fear and horror keeps deserting him each time Martin realizes he’s already done the mourning. For Sasha, sublimated into a general sense of wrongness but still blunting the real revelation of its impact; for Tim, after that, how impossible Martin finds it to be shocked, how aware he has to be of that absence instead, when he knows he was saying goodbye the whole time.

After all, it was obvious in retrospect that’s what the dreams were, when Martin’s normal panoply of varying anxiety dreams and the occasional element of complete nonsense were displaced by painfully fuzzy impressions of darkened theaters and crushing hopeless bereavement, his mind straining for comprehension—or even movement—that didn’t come, like his eyes feel when Martin’s managed to forget his glasses, until he’d woke. The dreams were so blurry and generic as to go from the pitifulness of sublimated sympathy to just being embarrassing, Martin had thought. Not to mention also coming so single-minded as to entirely displace his usual appropriated vague snippets of other people’s horrors—his mind tastelessly clipping statements like newspaper—intermixed with his own fear of failure.

Of course he hadn’t brought it up. And then come August, and the alternating boredom and breathless panic of waiting out the assault on Great Yarmouth when Martin himself had given himself the job—still pathetic, however vital—of being the distraction, a punching bag, the one with the pitiful enough trauma he’d be guaranteed to work as bait. And the plan worked out not enough and _never_ enough, and then _Jon_ —

So Martin had been too busy dealing with waking tragedy and crisis, was the upshot of it, to sit down and take stock of what exactly was filling his nightmare quota, as long as the impact on him was basically unchanged. It took until two days after Mr. Lukas had, surreally, sent everyone home—so to speak—for Martin to realize he’d stopped having Tim’s nightmares completely.

Because he had been.

And Tim was dead.  
  
Well.  
  
He doesn’t go back to dreaming first-person fragments cribbed from stale old statements whose purpose he didn’t get to understand. Martin _does_ dream, every night, like even a few days off work is enough to make his imagination start going stir-crazy now he’s not spending his time extrapolating other people’s PTSD. And he doesn’t even get to dwell on his own.

It brings him no clarity. He’s no closer to knowing why; how to get something out of this, or how to stop.

Not like he can even give a statement about it, Martin thought, a few nights in, and surprised himself by it, choking silently on a laugh that still died like a sob.

He didn’t dislike burning them, he thinks. The statements. The first half of his plan. That was the last thing resembling a spark of joy Martin had in the past month, and that only because he’s not feeling like looking further back. Fat lot of good it did him in the end but at the time there was something bright and living—livid—in pulling together all his hoarded agency into a stunt that unexpected. Martin didn’t dislike it. He _liked_ hurting Elias.

Beyond that gets muddled, or would if Martin were trying to unravel it. He isn’t. When he turns the memory over in his mind Martin resists the urge, for once, to break it down any further. It’s its own small diorama: the way Jon pressed his lighter into Martin’s hand and Martin swallowed his reaction with years’ practice and a little self-loathing. The self-control that was in practice spilled over to the point where Martin left the awkward stammering to Jon for a second; the way Jon seemed not apologetic but ashamed, when he asked if Martin could make sure to only (hate in his voice, abstract, unsteady) burn what they could _afford to lose_.

It let Martin just say yes, instead of saying he’d cross-checked the tapes Jon had filed already. Or staring at his hand, the lighter; or saying something stupid. For once. He said yes, and Jon looked relieved and then ashamed of the relief, and he made excuses about as quickly as he always does after that.

(Shame, from Jon, looks a lot like anger, and Martin suspects more people than not can’t tell the inflection point where Jon’s directing it inward exists. It’s obvious to Martin, sure, or he thinks it is, but he’s got practice. Jon himself probably can’t tell.)

* * *

Martin hardly gives Mr. Lukas’s mention of counseling a second thought. Specifically, hardly and second: Martin wants to know if he was that unnecessarily cruel on purpose. There are three professionals in the greater London area who are any kind of competent to deal with the supernatural—or, well, two, Martin thinks. He’s paged past the statement that brought it down to two, a while back, when he was looking for something else.

Because Martin’s thought about it, enough to have already been sure long before things hit this point that the attempt would hurt more than its absence. He thought it all the way through, because, well, in a way it’s all the same, right? Only so many flavors of human misery, same reason he feels accustomed and inured these days at all, so maybe he’d benefit from talking about it even not being able to explain the _causes_ for his troubles without likely as not getting himself sectioned. There was even a chance, way back when—over a year ago, after Prentiss, before Martin knew he’d have to explain anyone dying. He’d had some time off to think about it then too. He’d even almost made the call.

And then he couldn’t, just couldn’t, wanted to throw up even thinking about it. (Though that could be not eating, or anxiety, or fear; he wasn’t keeping much track then of anything but time.) Martin resolved then that trying not to explain would hurt more than complete secrecy ever could. And he still thinks he was right.

So instead of being tempted with the idea of comfort, he just wonders: did Mr. Lukas know that’s what he was saying, or does he really think… (Martin wants to know his enemy, is the thing. He hardly knows how to approach the question of whether it’s worth trying.) And he thinks about the prospect of therapy again, now that he’s been reminded; but barely, and bitterly.

Martin could hardly explain the dreams he’s having to some well-intentioned counselor, even, and that’s the height of his plausibly deniable problems right now. More than ever, with Tim—out of the question and no novel horrors to more safely make up the gap inside him, what Martin’s got to show for himself is a hollow churn of anxiety, drained as he feels of all meaning.

He’s got no reason to know it’s anything of significance beyond that.

He knows anyway. It’s like that sometimes.

So it’s like this: Martin would hardly be aware anything had happened if he weren’t in the habit of trying to keep track, he’d hardly know they were dreams at all. It feels like memory, someone else’s, more stable than a snapshot. Because the thing about photographs is they promise a future, right? You know that whatever was there, it ended, after. Time moved on past that moment, for better or for worse. People moved on. Things _finished_.

The dreams, the not-memories that shouldn’t be Martin’s at all, that he keeps no record of clarity of but the memory of clarity in… they don’t feel like that. He sees people he doesn’t know and doesn’t recognize and knows he knows in the dream, looking in on them and he is _sure_ , somehow, that this is forever. That time will pass but this will not, and as for what ‘this’ is: someone—one single person, always—in the worst moment of their life. In which nothing but that will ever happen again. In which it can’t get worse and it can’t get better and there is nothing that cannot be known about it or that would change once learnt.

That he can learn.

But the details vanish when he wakes up, which—that just figures, doesn’t it? That Martin gets to remember knowing but can’t actually know what he knows. Just that disconcerting sense of the memory of having had a memory, and the feel, beyond any kind of deja vu: it’s not that nothing matters, it’s just that everything’s already beyond changing. (It’s not actually an impediment to getting up and going on with his day, which should maybe surprise him. It doesn’t.) He doesn’t get anything in terms of a spill of additional feeling or context from the unknown people he examines in his dreams, during or afterward. He feels nothing about it, about or for them, which would really be disconcerting if both the nothing and the acceptance of it weren’t perfectly insulating him. Leaving Martin cocooned in uncharacteristic vaguely interested indifference, but uninvested and distanced from even what he knows he’s seen as if by a thick and roiling icy fog.

That is all he gets: the irritant that is lost knowledge but a sense of distance from it. The memory of a memory, in a dream. A stubbornly self-reinforcing mood.

It shouldn’t stick with him this much, given that. It certainly shouldn’t feel so assuredly real and meaningful. There ought to be room in his life, in his mind, for Martin to assume he’s being paranoid to think that this is more than the same amorphous stress as ever, nothing spooky or significant.

Or otherwise he shouldn’t feel so calm to be sure, utterly certain, that there is a cause beyond himself that reaches through him in the night: and yet.

That’s every night, as soon as he lets his eyes close or near as. It’s certainly curtailing the likelihood of wasting his time on depression naps, Martin’s noted, not without some joking edge to it. Smiles undertaken for his own sake may feel more than anything else like mouthing at a switchblade, but—childish as it feels to think this way—it’s not like anyone else _but_ Martin is going to appreciate his sense of humor any time soon. Or anything else about him.

But it’s just as well; sleep hasn’t been a refuge for years now, and Martin’s privately sure he wouldn’t trust anything that felt like solace at this point, just on principle. He just wants it to feel like _rest_. He wants a break in the unrelenting texture of all of this, the way it dominates his existence. Not in the sense of a psychotic break (and it’s been ages that he’s had no room for any nightmares about hallways in which he can’t stop seeing nothing make sense and the urgent inability to—well, it’s a fringe benefit, that—but please, not a break in the psychosis sense), of course, but…

Well, it would have to be something like that, though, or finding himself in another world, wouldn’t it? That’s the whole reason it makes him feel so empty, Martin is fairly sure, to review the things he knows. The knowing that nothing real has changed about the world around him. He’s seen things, learned things, lost; but that’s it, that is literally it, the world itself had always already closed in around him in all its immense horrors, no other option exists. He never actually lived anywhere else. There’s nowhere to wish he could go back to.

* * *

He goes to visit Jon, of course, when he can; and isn’t that a strange construction? There’s nothing really _stopping_ him, after all, and this should be something Martin wants. He’s conclusively established an inability to manage wanting much else. And—Martin feels guilty about this, or at least knows he should—by the looks of it, besides Georgie, who Martin’s not managed to cross paths with, and Martin himself, Jon… doesn’t really have anyone, does he?

They say you’re supposed to talk to people in comas. Martin doesn’t know if that still applies when there’s no heartbeat and no breath but an EEG in constant upheaval he couldn’t read if he felt like trying. He looks at the monitor over Jon’s shoulder, sometimes. He looked it up—that’s what he does, he’d thought weakly, he looks things up—and worked out how Jon’s not actually in a coma, per se. Rather the opposite.

Jon should be dead.

 _Martin_ should be scared, probably, scared sounds about right, looking at the inert-except-not evidence of how far gone the man he—how far gone Jon is from human. That, or he should talk to him. But instead Martin’s thoughts run circles around the question of what’s sustaining Jon and what of Jon is being sustained and whether there is, could ever be, anything left over; and with all that going on Martin can’t think of anything to tell him.

The doctors don’t speak to him; none of the staff do, none interact more than they have to. This Martin hardly minds at all. He knows their type and doesn’t want to be responsible for it, and he gets the hang of avoiding them back almost immediately. It’s Martin’s own baggage coloring the situation, of course, but he wishes he could make himself believe that’s all it is. Martin can barely manage to experiment with a mundane reason for his discomfort before it falls to pieces, though, for all that what he’s got within normal _should_ explain it. That he knows even by glimpses what it looks like for doctors to resent what they see as being forced to babysit a glorified corpse and he hates them back for it.

Martin finds hating people awkward and painful, generally. Even, or especially, now, knowing it’s not any of their _fault_. (That, in fact, they have more of an excuse than usual to feel that way. That they might be right…)

It doesn’t help him not feel wrong and awful, and then guilty as he does it. It doesn’t help him explain. Something’s broken, Martin thinks, aside from—well—everything; something’s missing; and he just doesn’t know what he could say.

* * *

He tries not to want to go back to work, at first; tries to want almost anything else, and can’t quite make it stick. Martin thinks he might’ve forgotten how, actually, at this point, like it’s just been too long since he had anything else in his life. He _does_ manage to know he’s being pathetic, but somewhere along the way, something or other inside him already broke, and now he’s lost the knack for knowing that meaning he actually makes himself stop.

So he does. Or doesn’t, rather; doesn’t stop, or find anything else to want, or manage to use what’s theoretically a breather to rediscover how to be a person in the ways Martin thinks, if not knows, he’s lost the muscle memory for. He does go back.

Mr. Lukas’s (“Martin, honestly, call me Peter”) eyes are very bright when he asks if Martin’s sure; points out that he’s hardly out of leave, after all, and none of Martin’s peers have cared enough to come back. (He doesn’t put it like that.) All of him lit up with a kind of avid anticipation Martin realizes with no surprise in it that he’s seen in others enough to be used to it, leaning like a sunflower toward their mutual certainty that the answer to _Martin, are you sure you’re all right?_ is no.

It would be easy, Martin thinks, for him to do something else right now; it would be impossible.

In a way Martin is actually glad to be the first one back. Would rather have the chance to get his bearings before he has to negotiate others’: Tim’s absence, whatever will be going on with Basira, and Melanie…

Of course he’s known what to expect from Melanie. Forget the finer points of debate regarding whether or not to solve their problems with murder, Martin’s selfishly glad he doesn’t have to deal with the near-certainty she’ll see his visiting Jon’s not-dead body in the hospital as a betrayal. Of _who_ he isn’t quite certain beyond the cringing dread of confrontation: of their dead, of the entire human species; of Melanie herself, in particular. It’s not that Martin expects her ‘I told you so’ to come at knifepoint, at least not yet, but he hardly enjoys having to consider the possibility.

And he can’t say he doesn’t know what she wants from him, even. If he’s really, truly honest with himself, Martin can even grasp the memory of wanting the same thing.

Because: much as Martin’s worried about Jon, something’s crystallized inside him while he sat there and watched Jon not breathe, tiny and awful and immediately, obviously, dully unshakeable: either eventually Jon won’t need any protection Martin could ever offer, or he’ll die first. Martin knows which option he prefers as well as he knows who’d hate him for it, but it’s already out of his hands.

Presumably it always was, and now it’s obvious.

So Martin doesn’t get that kind of options and he doesn’t get that kind of power, and of course he knows what he’s _supposed_ to do with that. The whole point he’s heart-in-his-throat bemoaning is how well it turns out Martin knows the way this story goes: down on the record as the inexorable progression that awaits everyone like him.

Be human, do his best, and die, eventually, one way or another.

(It doesn’t have to be the kind of blaze of glory he’s certain Melanie will be even more sure she’ll get consensus on—it doesn’t occur to her to ask—if she finds out that the two of them now have fresh trauma in common to never, ever actually bring up. Martin knew talking her out of it the first time that he shouldn’t expect to manage it a second.)

It’s hard to actually see any kind of meaningful difference in the permutations of fate he can expect. Hero, sacrifice, victim, martyr: they feel like names for the same thing by now. They’re all dead.

Like Tim. Like the Sasha he will never have known. And like a legacy they’re just trailing after, hardly even recorded; like Michael Shelley—and apparently everyone else who crossed Gertrude Robinson’s path without being monsters themselves at the time, which really would seem to support Martin’s point here—

He’s got a body of knowledge enough to foretell what road he’s on. All these stories of people Martin quietly suspects were probably better than he’ll ever manage now, when they were people. With more left to them than Jon was ever going to get, long before either of them knew what was coming.

With no idea what was going on.

The thing is, Martin Blackwood wants to live. Quite a lot, actually. It’s not like it wouldn’t have been easier to do otherwise than not, if he’d ever wanted it. But he wants to live. All this time watching the people around him barrel toward the alternative hasn’t given Martin any more of a taste for it.

Maybe it should’ve. But it hasn’t.

What he says to _Peter,_ because the question he’s asking isn’t any of his business, is: of course Martin’s sure, with the slight waver at the edges he’s almost certain will serve him well here. Of course. If no one but him has cared to come back then no one’s been reading statements, have they?

* * *

That answer doesn’t surprise him, either, but he had never really expected it to.

**Author's Note:**

> **[Amandant](https://twitter.com/fantasticvocab/status/979372705031114752)** , _adj._ a kind of agent of the increase of command.


End file.
